Low-Fat Guidelines Jumped The Gun

While you probably already knew this, the reasons for the low-fat dietary guidelines are continuing to be exposed for their lack of scientific evidence.

Business Insider recently reported on how this recommended diet wasn’t only unfounded, but it was backed by sugar companies who were set to benefit from a low-fat diet. Check it out:

That national dietary shift from fat towards sugar came about at least in part because of a major 1967 review of dietary science. Those historical documents reveal that a food industry group called the Sugar Research Foundation (SRF) paid three Harvard researchers $6,500 (about $50,000 today) to discount research that increasingly showed links between sugar and heart disease and to point the blame at fat instead. The industry group selected the data the Harvard scientists used for the review and suggested the research they include. Their final paper, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, set the US diet on a new course.

When dietary guidelines started to call for low-fat diets, carbohydrates, specifically refined sugar, start to replace the fats in people’s diets. Not only that but more and more saturated fats were being replaced with trans fats. New research over the last several years has repeatedly shown the serious health concerns of trans fats, and high-carb/high-sugar diets. On top of that, saturated fats continue to show far fewer health concerns than dietary guidelines would allow you to believe.

Now, researchers say all that sugar consumption has led to a serious increase in the diabetes rate. When a low-fat diet was tested against a low-carbohydrate diet — as long as both were low in calories overall — the low-carb was much more beneficial, the researchers showed. People on the low-carb diet lost abdominal fat and body mass, had improved glucose tolerance, better cholesterol, and less inflammation. All of those measurements got worse on the low-fat diet, in which fat was replaced with carbs.

As people start to become more aware of good fats, and how detrimental high-carb intake can be, hopefully, we will start to see changes in dietary guidelines.